In this original essay, artist and researcher Iain Biggs builds on his earlier essay for ClimateCultures to explore ‘wild deep mapping’. This approach offers many possible modes of address, where practitioners follow their particular, informed and sensitive intuitions about the complexity and relationality of place in time. Mapping that is diverse, ancient, and full of information.
Iain is an independent artist, teacher and researcher interested in place as seen through the lens of Felix Guattari’s ecosophy, working extensively on ‘deep mapping’, other projects and publications. His essay on ‘Wild’ Deep Mapping is the sixth in our Longer feature, where ClimateCultures members share original works, or ones that haven’t appeared online elsewhere, and which don’t fit easily into the regular ClimateCultures blog; Longer provides space to explore in more detail creative and critical responses to our ecological and climate crisis.
The wild is imagination — so is community — so is a good time. Let’s be tough but good-natured Green or Rainbow warriors, make cause with wild nature, and have some ferocious fun while doing it.1
– Gary Snyder
Introduction
This essay extends one that ClimateCultures has previously published: Open Deep Mappings Today – a Personal Introduction. Since I wrote that essay, I’ve been involved in various ways with issues relating to ‘open’ or, as I’d say now, ‘wild’ deep mappings. Most recently through a series of presentations by, and conversations with, members of the artists’ network Space Place Practice. But also with Gareth Thomas, UNESCO-Bridges Head of Community Research, about alternative ways to approach rural research in relation to the Teifi Demonstrator Project. The Space Place Practice ‘rural’ sub-group has been exploring deep mappings both in terms of reading and reflecting on some of what I’d see as its core texts and through feedback sessions on participants’ own practical projects. I’ve also been re-reading the poet Paula Meehan’s three wonderful lectures, collected in Imaginary Bonnets with Real Bees in Them, which have reminded me of the central importance of an imaginative mentalité that privileges poetics over analytics, and of the relevance of Gary Snyder’s thinking to deep mappings. So, this essay is an updating of my thinking in Open Deep Mappings Today, a reflection on issues raised by various conversations, and a re-imagining of ‘open’ deep mapping in the spirit of Gary Snyder.
I’m using the term ‘wild’ here where, in the past, I used ‘open’ or ‘feral’. (I can no longer use the term ‘feral’, given the deeply egotistical sub-text of George Monbiot’s book of that name2). The deep mappings that tend to most interest me are very varied and ‘undisciplined’, in the sense of not being limited by the presuppositions of any single intellectual discipline, orientation or set of practices.3 ‘Wild’ too then in the sense that those mappings take account, if only tacitly, of Geraldine Finn’s dictum that we are always “both more and less than the categories that name and divide us”.4 A view I see as ultimately inseparable from two other observations she makes that separate deep mapping’s inevitable immersion in what she calls “the politics of contingency” from the presuppositions of general, if not universal, applicability on which ‘scientific’ academic orthodoxy rests. Firstly, its challenge to “the traditional ontological assumptions of high-altitude thinking, thinking forgetful of its contingent roots in particular persons, places and time”.5 Secondly, the understanding that: “keeping alive local memory and imagination as a reservoir of meanings, truths, and possibilities for a different future”6 is fundamental both to ecological well-being and to democracy.
To put all this another way, I now see those involved in ‘wild’ deep mapping as following their particular, informed and sensitive intuitions about the complexities and relationality of place in time, much as a dog let out into an unfamiliar field on a frosty morning follows its nose. A dog explores an unfamiliar place by running all over it, seemingly at random, but in fact picking up on and evaluating numerous sensory clues as to what has occurred and left a trace; on what is significant or unusual enough to attract attention in the here and now. This sense of an enthusiastic, unsystematic yet far from naïve ‘wildness’ is important for several reasons. It runs counter to the schematic, militarily oriented basis of our standard cartographic conventions. It’s more likely to be open to identifying and promoting aspects of subjugated knowledge, languages and ‘native’ ways of knowing that are dismissed, opposed, or simply ignored by mainstream thinking. And, finally, because deep mappings need to include disruptive or unexpected elements which prevent their ‘readers/viewers/listeners’ from settling into any sense of a given or taken-for-granted intellectual perspective or context.
The deep mappings I have in mind are also ‘wild’ in senses suggested by Gary Snyder, poet, anthropologist and environmental activist. He writes:
It has always been part of basic human experience to live in a culture of wilderness. There has been no wilderness without some kind of human presence for several hundred thousand years. Nature is not a place to visit, it is home—and within that home territory there are more familiar and less familiar places.7
‘Wild’ then because, as he argues: “Consciousness, mind, imagination, and language are fundamentally wild. ‘Wild’ as in wild ecosystems – richly interconnected, interdependent, and incredibly complex. Diverse, ancient, and full of information.”8
Wild deep mapping and ‘impact’
However, this emphasis on the wildness of certain deep mappings does not exclude the possibility that they may have positive practical outcomes in terms of current socio-environmental issues. However, while questions about that possibility are entirely appropriate, they usually can’t be answered in the expected terms. That is, either in terms of the demonstrable ‘outcomes’ expected by academic and other institutions when auditing arts-led research or creative projects, or in terms of the demand by activists who insist on working for visible change right now. Something of why the expectation of ‘impact’ in either case is rarely appropriate can be indicated by the example of Tim Robinson’s work.
Tim Robinson (who as an artist worked early on under the name Timothy Drever), is best known as a cartographer and writer who worked in the west of Ireland. Robinson (an Englishman) and his Irish-speaking wife and collaborator Máiréad moved to Ireland in 1972, where he began making highly detailed large-scale maps of the Aran Islands. His best-known work is the two-volume Stones of Aran, an exhaustive exploration of that terrain based on the relationship between its physical qualities as a place with a long history of human inhabitation and a rich cultural identity articulated in the highly descriptive and nuanced manner available in the Irish language and known as dindshenchas, loosely translatable as ‘place lore’.9
Probably the best insight into the practical impact of Robinson’s work is provided by Dr Nessa Cronin, Head of Irish Studies at the School of Geography, Archaeology and Irish Studies, University of Galway. An authority on Robinson’s work, she has worked with artists, activists and community groups on socially engaged projects investigating issues concerning place, language, culture and the environment in contemporary Ireland. As Cronin sees it, in such contexts: “Tim Robinson’s work has become a touchstone for those interested in, and concerned with, the changing nature of modern Irish landscape”.10 As she goes on to make clear, it would be a mistake to assume that community mapping projects of the kind associated with deep mapping are no more than “an expression of a local community mapping exercise”. They may very well also “incorporate strands of the global, whether through the expression of shared concerns about the environmental degradation of local water systems” or through their acknowledgement of “migrant spaces (whether ‘old’ or ‘new’) within existing local communities.”11 In short, they can change a community’s perceptions in positive ways.
A further value of such work, as already indicated, is its challenge to academic cartographic assumptions by offering “different kinds of knowledge and different registers of ‘fact-finding’ and ‘truth making'”.12 In an appropriate context, for example that of the X-PO community mapping project initiated by artist Dierdre O’Mahony and discussed by Cronin, the ability to mount such a challenge increases community confidence and resilience by reinforcing a shared sense of the validity of local knowledges and respect for the individuals who embody them. Robinson’s work can, in consequence, be said to have provided a locally appropriate touchstone for others in the region and beyond. However, in an institutional context, whether artistic or academic, it would be very difficult to categorically establish that Robinson’s work served as the ’cause’ of which the X-PO project was an ‘effect’.
Wild deep mappings in a global context: two ‘story-telling’ approaches.
Kaavad: Travelling Shrine: Home
In my previous essay I borrowed the premise of Ursula K Le Guin’s wonderful 1988 essay The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction to suggest that open deep mappings provides a container for an inclusive sense of a particular place as the possibility of home, “home being another, larger kind of pouch or bag, a container for people”.13 Ultimately, then, home as the whole biosphere on which people and all other living things depend. Le Guin’s concern with storytelling is particularly useful here because it converges with the geographer Doreen Massey’s understanding of space as a simultaneity of ‘stories-so-far’14, which in turn links to notions of our relational, embodied selves as the confluence of numerous ongoing conversations.
I would like to suggest the Indian artist Gulammohammed Sheikh’s major project: Kaavad: Travelling Shrine: Home15, with its images of maps drawn from historical examples, as an instance of a ‘storytelling’ approach that I see as a form of wild deep mapping. One that is particularly appropriate in the light of questions about deep mappings and socio-environmental concerns. Sheikh is from a Muslim family in Gujarat, a state that’s been subject to extreme anti-Muslim violence and counter-violence over many years. He has long been committed to staging visual conversations between different, sometimes contradictory, stories-so-far across both space and time. This draws in part on his childhood in pre-Partition India, when the belief systems of different religious groups interacted peacefully within a heterogeneous popular culture. Consequently, much of his work can be said to counter attempts by the current party in government that draws much of its support from Hindu Nationalism and that seeks to suppress meaningful cultural exchange in contemporary India.
Kaavad: Travelling Shrine: Home is made up on thirty-four images on folding panels that, closed, form a room-like box taller than a person and, when unfolded, can be repositioned in many ways to suggest intersecting narratives. Sheikh, a secularist in the tradition of the Indian constitution, uses this complex structural device to provide a new, expanded sense for the richness of the popular heterogeneous multi-faith Indian culture he experienced in Gujarat during his childhood. Traditionally speaking, a kaavad is a portable, folding, wooden shrine used by nomadic storytellers to reveal images of different gods, goddesses, saints, local heroes, and patrons as their narratives unfold.16 For Sheikh, however, it serves as a secular device, as a way to: “retrieve the sense of the spiritual from organised religious practices and to transpose it to the realm of the secular”. But also as: “a site for atonement for innocent victims of the senseless violence of our times, be it in Gujarat, Palestine or … It could be a motif of remembrance, of memory”.17 Through it he enfolds figures from radically different backgrounds and spiritual traditions — his mother, medieval Hindu and Sufi saints, an anonymous sweeper, the Chinese Buddhist scholar Shoriken, St. Francis, Gandhi, and the prophet Mohammed — all within a complex, multifaceted, conversational or storytelling matrix that has no fixed linear structure. Sheikh imagines conversations between stories-so-far as a non-believer, but one deeply concerned about the failure of liberal, humanist cultural education in a fractious ‘post-secular’ world. The results are complex relocations and implied reinterpretations of old narrative themes within a new, cosmopolitan, multiverse, with the work’s many enfolding panels visually evoking a ‘safe space’ for debate.
Sheikh spent many years helping to create, and then defend, a secular educational space for Indian art students. However, in 1992 he was expelled from his academic post due to political pressure. I see Sheikh as having a practice that draws on, and works out of, a variety of distinct skills and understandings — those associated with his roles as painter, poet, secular participant in Muslim culture, educator, activist, editor and cultural observer. Activities that then feed into Kaavad’s polyvocal visual conversation about heterogeneity and tolerance. As with any work of art, it is simply not possible to say to what extent, if at all, Kaavad has increased a positive awareness of heterogeneity or helped its viewers to become more tolerant people. What is clear, however, is that it models and, given its qualities as an artwork, embodies a mentalité for which those values are central.
In deliberately choosing a non-Western work as an instance of a ‘storytelling’ approach for wild deep mappings I am also hoping to open out a sense of many possible modes of address for deep mapping, including one based on the traditional skills of the narrative painter in both Indian and Western traditions. I also hope to unsettle any assumption that the underlying imaginatively-informed mentalité — in the sense of feelings about and orientation to the eco-social context in which a person finds themselves; their sense of their place within that context, their overall outlook and worldview — from which deep mapping springs is in any necessary sense ‘Western’. Over time I’ve come to see that underlying mentalité as predicated on an orientation that is animated by cultural poetics of many kinds, rather than on the assumptions of the analytic mind central to the now dominant global culture.
The Water Diviner
My second suggested example of a story-telling approach is an installation work by another Indian artist, Sheba Chhachhi.18 A photographer, installation artist and activist, Sheba Chhachhi’s immersive installation, The Water Diviner (2008), employed as its central notion dowsing for the memory of water in Delhi, more specifically for the ‘lost’ Yamuna River, which for decades has resembled a sewage canal. Using an assembly of books, water, light, video projection lightboxes, Chhachhi created an immersive site-specific environment in a former swimming pool, now a record room, in the basement of Delhi Public Library, Chandni Chowk. (A plaque at the entrance of the library commemorates the inauguration of the swimming pool by a British officer in the 1900s.) Entered through the main library, a small doorway opened onto a large relief of a lion’s head, jaws agape, surrounded by stacks of files. This marked an old aqueduct, encircled by a stone font, leading into a large space with the floor sloping to the far end, the colonial swimming pool. The resulting cascading terrain, created from piled high bundles of documents, files, records tied with string, etc., related to the tracing and transformation of space and time, to archival memory and to anxieties about a collective future. Using this terrain, the work drew connections between the lion’s head fountain as the spring of clean water and Yamuna River as the lifeline of Shahjahanabad / Old Delhi, characterised in the work by the animated image of an elephant forming from and dissolving into particles of filth. As with any serious deep mapping, the installation referred to buried or neglected knowledge, probed the sedimentation of time and memory back through the colonial to the Mughal and pre-Mughal past, followed multiple traces — maps, images, myths, stories, archival texts — to propose an alternative geography of water in which the sedimentation of cultural memory is a critical cause of human apathy and ecological catastrophe.
It is perhaps impossible to know whether The Water Diviner gave additional impetus to long-delayed plans to clean up the Yamuna, plans originally launched in 1985, which none-the-less remains heavily polluted to this day. In 2025 the recently elected city government of New Delhi, the Bharatiya Janata Party, announced (another) ambitious plan to clean up the Yamuna River, this time within three years, by reducing pollution and improving sewage treatment, waste management and sanitation. The failure of multiple past initiatives and substantial financial investment to generate any substantive impact on the state of the 22-kilometre stretch of the river passing through Delhi has resulted in a situation where public opinion mixes enthusiasm for a substantial clean-up with deep scepticism that this can be achieved through the current three-year plan.19
PrairyErth (a deep map)
Although the examples I’ve given to date suggest that any straightforward notion of cause and effect applied to deep mappings is unlikely to meet strict criteria of proof there are, however, examples that can be shown to have produced tangible positive results.
William Least Heat-Moon’s PrairyErth (a deep map),20 offers a literary evocation that’s the outcome of an exhaustive six-year exploration of Chase County, Kansas, the last remaining expanse of tall-grass prairie in the US. It weaves together ecological concern, ‘participatory history’, a wonderful chorus of quotations, and archival research, all playfully integrated through homage to Laurence Sterne’s 18th-century novel Tristram Shandy. It also perfectly represents the slow, polyvocal approach to an inclusive deep mapping I most admire.
Talitta Reitz discusses the impact of PrairyErth in her book chapter Back to the Drawing Board: Creative Mapping Methods for Inclusion and Connection and, by implication, raises issues that have implications for the understanding of how the impact of deep mappings may be achieved. Reitz reports that, asked about PrairyErth, a Chase County rancher said: “the book had a positive impact, overall, because I think it raised our self-esteem. We thought: ‘Wow, somebody could see something in us that we didn’t see’.” By 1991, the year PrairyErth was published, its author’s research had re-animated a century-old conversation about establishing a national park. Reitz writes that the following year “by the efforts of proud ranchers and inspired preservationists, the Tall Grass National Preserve was created”, adding that: “PrairyErth nourished – and still does – local aspirations to protect the ecology, the culture, and the history of the prairie landscape”.21
As I have suggested elsewhere, I think we need to be a little sceptical about both Reitz and the rancher’s claim that it was the book’s impact that prompted the local change of heart which resulted in the creation of the Tall Grass National Preserve. Given my experience of predominantly rural communities, I think it is unlikely that more than a fraction of the inhabitants of Chase County actually read Least Heat-Moon’s six-hundred-and-twenty-four-page text. (Although many will, no doubt, have found ways of checking whether they were included among those either mentioned by name in the text itself or included in the section In Thanks on its final two pages.) What I believe is much more likely is that Least Heat-Moon’s active, open and conversational presence in the region over six years, the process that led to the creation of the book, provided the critical catalyst in the necessary change of heart. If I am correct, then the book itself served as tangible evidence that that catalytic activity had taken place.
I base this view in part on the implications of an observation made by Jane Bailey, with whom I worked on a substantive deep mapping project in Cornwall that, for a variety of reasons, produced no lasting ‘outcome’ because the envisaged website failed to materialise. In a chapter discussing the challenges of working with deep mapping as a performative process, she writes:
I arranged for Iain Biggs to present to the St Breward Local History Group to enable the potential for the notion of deep mapping to intersect in a particular way with the participative aspects of the research. Biggs’ presentation explained the background to our research project and how it might relate to the group’s local history interests and, in doing so, introduced the notion of deep mapping to the community. It was a well-attended event that stimulated an animated conversation about deep mapping and related ideas and, in retrospect, it stands out as a key event within the research.22
In short, it is likely that, as Jane Bailey’s chapter as a whole strongly suggests, it was the performative, conversational process conducted by Least Heat-Moon, rather than simply individuals’ attentive reading of the book itself, that changed hearts and minds.
Deep mappings in Minneapolis/St. Paul
In 2010 I made a work called Notes Towards a Deep Map for an exhibition at the University of Minnesota curated by Christine Baeumler, at that point an untenured lecturer in the Department of Art and now a professor in Interdisciplinary Art and Social Practice there. That work became a catalyst for discussions about deep mapping that supported and extended two existing initiatives. Chris Baeumler had been working with a Dakota activist, artist and media worker called Mona Smith, who had set up and was running Allies: media/arts. Our collective discussions fed into Mona’s curation of the Bdote Memory Map, which became an online deep mapping created to serve as an educational act of witnessing and support for the Dakota people in the region. The second initiative, at that point known as the Lower Phalen Creek Project, was being coordinated by Chris Baeumler, who was working with local people to reclaim a derelict railway stockyard built on land sacred to the Dakota people as a nature reserve.
Fifteen years later, that initiative resulted in the creation of the Wakan Tipi Awanyankapi. The collective achievement of the local community, cohorts of student volunteers and the efforts of Dakota activists, this environmental restoration project has transformed the site, which is now a Native-led environmental stewardship area that stretches from Lake Phalen to the Mississippi River and throughout the East Side River District of St. Pauls. Chris Baeumler told me recently that the group could not have addressed the multiple issues required to undertake such a complex environmental restoration project without the example of deep mapping as an approach. It would clearly be absurd for me to suggest that either the Bdote Memory Map or Wakan Tipi Awanyankapi are the direct result of my making and exhibiting Notes Towards a Deep Map (now in the collection of the Royal West of England Academy). What I might reasonably claim, however, is that the work animated conversations about deep mapping that fed into various performative processes that, in turn, have contributed to the realisation of those two initiatives.
Map Digi Penfro. Rowan O’Neill / Span Arts.
It seems appropriate to end this essay by referring to a project closer to home and, if only indirectly, one relevant to the current British Labour Government’s criminalising of any expression of support for Palestine Action, using the 2000 Terrorism Act. A clear attempt to dissuade all those whose humanitarian concern is to disrupt or, better still, end the genocide currently being conducted by the Israeli Government against the Palestinian population of Gaza.
In 2019 Rowan O’Neill worked with Span Arts in Pembrokeshire on a pilot deep mapping project as part of Span Digidol. To help consolidate work undertaken during an intensive weekend spent on the Strumble Head Peninsula in the company of a geologist, archaeologist, botanist and poet, Rowan invited myself and Erin Kavanagh — a poet, researcher and performer interested in deep mapping — to help her run workshops for interested local people. Map Digi Penfro, the online map created as a result, is a collective deep mapping of the Narberth community’s interests in its place, history and traditions.
My contribution to the workshop was to tell a story about migrants that borrowed from the work of two local historians — Mary John in Wales and Victoria Donohoe in the USA. My aim was to illustrate the value of deep mappings to a local community. My starting point was the 17th-century Quaker burial ground outside Narberth, evidence that the Society of Friends — the Quakers — had a strong local presence from around 1650. For many years the Quakers were continually and often violently persecuted for rejecting both the authority of the Church of England and social hierarchies, for being pacifists, and for believing in equality between men and women. Many left Wales for Pennsylvania to escape this persecution. In just one year — 1682-83 — twenty-three shiploads of Welsh Quakers crossed the Atlantic to settle in Pennsylvania. In March of 1682, a man called Henry Lewis from Narberth had bought 1,000 acres of land in Pennsylvania — part of what became known as The Welsh Tract — and later the site of a town called Elm. In 1893, for whatever reason, the town of Elm changed its name to Narberth.
You are unlikely to find much of interest in this account. From the point of view of wild deep mapping, however, what’s important about such histories is that they evidence a desire to live according to more democratic and egalitarian values, even if that meant spending two months crossing the Atlantic in tiny boats and then travelling inland to start a new life from scratch. Although large numbers of Quakers abandoned Wales for the USA in the 17th and 18th centuries, their concerns and values have been taken up by other Narberth citizens who were not necessarily Quakers. Searching through the mass of connections, tensions, and relationships that animated modern Narberth, I found new stories in the same tradition of concern. Stories about, for example, people welcoming and helping Syrian refugees, or willing to get a criminal record to protest Government inaction over the climate crisis. I believe such stories are important and deserve to be shared and celebrated. However, in constructing a collective deep map, a community must choose for itself which stories it wants to braid together to link the past and present to imaginings of its future.
I’ve been interested to discover, while writing this essay, that in 2025 Narberth Museum has chosen to hold a three-month exhibition — Poetry as Protest — bringing together poetry and visual art in a conscious effort to show that ‘Resistance is Fertile’. That suggests to me that the local Quaker tradition remains active there. It’s the same tradition that informs the Quaker Huw Lemmey’s recent piece in the London Review of Books, which he concluded by stating that: “Resisting the destruction of human life and the perpetuation of a genocide against the Palestinian people is not wrong. It is the law, and this government, that is wrong”.23
Perhaps all we can reasonably ask of any process leading to a wild deep mapping, or of that mapping itself, is that it seeks to become a touchstone of some kind for an inclusive sense of a particular place; a place that offers the possibility of providing a home in Ursula K Le Guin’s sense indicated earlier.
References
- Gary Snyder (1995) A Place in Space (Counterpoint, New York p. 64).
- For the reasoning behind this see my three-part essay on Feral.
- For a sample of these, see Deep mapping and beyond? An ongoing conversation at PLaCE International.
- Geraldine Finn (1996) Why Althusser Killed His Wife: Essays on Discourse and Violence (Humanities Press International, Highlands, New Jersey p. 156).
- Ibid. p. 137
- Ibid. p. 145
- Gary Snyder (1990) The Practice of the Wild (North Point Press, San Francisco p. 7).
- Gary Snyder (1995) A Place in Space (Counterpoint, New York p. 168).
- For a useful account of the relationship between the Irish language and place-lore see the Irish-language poet Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill’s Selected Essays (New Island, 2005).
- Nessa Cronin (2016) ‘”The fineness of things”: the deep mapping projects of Tim Robinson’s art and writings, 1969-72’ in Derek Gladwin & Christine Cusick (eds.) Unfolding Irish Landscapes: Tim Robinson, Culture and Environment (Manchester University Press, p. 53).
- Nessa Cronin (2017) ‘Deep Mapping Communities in the West of Ireland’ in Tom Lynch, Susan Naramore Maher, Drucilla Wall, & O. Alan Weltzien (eds.) Thinking Continental: Writing the Planet One Place at a Time (University of Nebraska Press, p. 47).
- Ibid. p. 48.
- Ursula K. Le Guin (2019 – first published 1988) The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction (Cosmosgenesis).
- Doreen Massey (2005) For Space (Sage Publications, p.9).
- See Gulammohammed Sheikh (2008) Kaavad: Travelling Shrine: Home (Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi). An online popular account of this work can be found in The many worlds of Gulammohammed Sheikh at The Week, published 1/6/25.
- See KAVAD – A traditional visual story telling device at jayharywhocares.wordpress.com.
- Gulammohammed Sheik (2008) Kavaad: Travelling Shrine: Home (Vadehra Gallery, New Delhi, p. 8)
- This work is extensively illustrated in Kumkum Sangari (ed). Arc Silt Dive: The Works of Sheba Chhachhi (Tulika Books, New Delhi). Images of the work can be found online here at Khoj Studios. An excellent first-hand account of visiting this installation, written by Alexander Keefe, can be found at Critical Collective.
- See, for example, No, it is not possible to clean up Yamuna in three years, published by Deccan Herald 22/2/25.
- William Least Heat-Moon (1999) PrairyErth: A Deep Map (Mariner Books / HarperCollins, New York).
- Talitta Reitz (2022) ‘Back to the Drawing Board: Creative Mapping Methods for Inclusion and Connection’ in Alex Franklin (ed) Co-Creativity and Engaged Scholarship: Transformative Methods in Social Sustainability Research (Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, Switzerland, p. 343).
- Jane Bailey (2019) ‘Mapping as a performative process: Some challenges presented by art-led mapping that aims to remain unstable and conversational’ in Nancy Duxbury, W.F. Garrett-Petts & Alys Longley (eds) Artistic Approaches To Cultural Mapping: Activating Imaginaries And Means Of Knowing (Routledge, London & New York, p. 199).
- Huw Lemmey ‘Short Cuts’ London Review of Books, 24 July 2025 pp. 10-11.
Further
Iain has written a short post for our blog to accompany this contribution to our Longer series. In Between “The Valley” and Dublin: ‘Narrative’ Deep Mappings? he introduces two fictional-poetic works that offer ‘narrative deep mappings’ as explorations of places that are never static, always in process: Ursula K Le Guin’s Always Coming Home, and Eavan Boland’s A Poet’s Dublin.
His previous posts include Open Deep Mapping: Conversations-in-process, Places-in-time and Disciplinary Agnosticism and Engaging with Ecologies of Place, and his earlier essay for our Longer feature is Open Deep Mappings Today – a Personal Introduction.
Artist James Aldridge reviewed Creative Engagements with Ecologies of Place, the book Iain co-authored with Mary Modeen, in Queer River and Creative Engagements with Ecologies of Place.
